Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Tuesday March 27, 2012 @03:11AM
from the confused-mice-with-foot-tumors dept.

sciencehabit writes, quoting an article in Science: "A single drug can shrink or cure human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver, and prostate tumors that have been transplanted into mice, researchers have found. The treatment, an antibody that blocks a 'do not eat' signal normally displayed on tumor cells, coaxes the immune system to destroy the cancer cells."
The abstract and full paper are freely available. It seems fairly promising: "In mice given human bladder cancer tumors, for example, 10 of 10 untreated mice had cancer that spread to their lymph nodes. Only one of 10 mice treated with anti-CD47 had a lymph node with signs of cancer. Moreover, the implanted tumor often got smaller after treatment — colon cancers transplanted into the mice shrank to less than one-third of their original size, on average. And in five mice with breast cancer tumors, anti-CD47 eliminated all signs of the cancer cells, and the animals remained cancer-free 4 months after the treatment stopped."

Actually, that's debatable, too. Putting the period inside the quotation marks every time is strictly an American English distortion of the English language.

In British English, the period goes inside or outside depending on whether it is part of what is being quoted. So about 18% of native English speakers and an even larger percentage of non-native English speakers would tell you that your rule is completely wrong.

Actually, it's quite "debatable". There are a lot of grammatical and spelling style guides. Nearly every publisher has one. They don't all agree on this particular detail (or many others).

Those of us who grew up in the UK were mostly taught the rule that periods go outside the quotes. But it turns out that the "rule" is more complex than that. Some UK publishers follow the usual rule for that part of the world, but a few have an in-house rule putting periods inside the quotes. Meanwhile, over acros

That's the nature of drug testing. You test it out in several animals of varying levels of similarity to humans before you start testing in humans. Mice are a common starting point because they're inexpensive and small, and you can run trials with thousands of mice. Also, mice sort of self-destruct if things start going badly in them, they are fairly fragile. So they make good canaries because when things are going badly, the signs are not often subtle.

Plenty of compounds show promising results in mice that prove to have reduced results in later trials with more complex animals or in humans, or show side effects only later in the drug study regime. Conversely it's almost certain that there are compounds out there which would provide amazing results in humans, but which failed early stage drug studies in animals. It's just not a great idea to be testing drugs for the first time in humans without some idea as to what the outcome would be; the fatality rate in animals is pretty high, and you can purposely infect them to treat for a specific disease. There are drugs that even with this prep work still fail in clinical (human) trials, either because of efficacy problems or because of unexpected or more-severe side effects, or some combination (if it's effective but with bad side effects in animals, then not very effective and with horrible side effects in humans, it will be rejected).

The study in this article is the very earliest stage. Usually they do tiny studies like this as the very first trial. Many, many drugs produce interesting results at this stage, and fail the very next set of studies (statistically large populations, which 10 mice is not, even with extremely promising results such as this). The chances of such a drug making it to clinical trials is vanishingly small, almost all compounds fail, only a few ever make it.

Such a prognosis would be rare. People have looked hopeless and ended up turning around and recovering. Doctors are extremely reluctant to pronounce you terminal, instead they read you the odds. Just last week, or the week before, I heard an interview on NPR with a woman who's had stage IV breast cancer that metastasized into her skeletal system for the past 25 years. She's tried a wide variety of cancer treatments, none of them have seemed to make much impact on her condition. Typical chances of survival for her cancer at that stage are pretty low (that's about the worst case scenario for breast cancer), but as she demonstrates, the only people whose actual survival time is known with any certainty are the people who are at the "days left to live" stage (and probably already on hospice care), not the "months/years" left stages.

The more certain they are about the survival chances, the more damage has already been done to the body. Even if you could cure the cancer side-effect free overnight, such patients would likely still die from complications.

Worst case I still die

Dying is not the worst case. Living fully aware, hooked up to a large pile of life support machines in substantial and unending pain is the worst case, and not out of the range of possibilities.

Drugs for terminal conditions do sometimes get approved for earlier human trials. But a study has to be running (there are several reasons they can't just take one-off patients as they become available, it creates too many uncontrollable factors, and makes double-blind methodology all but impossible). For all clinical trials, patients have to be free from complications which may distort results in the study (if you accept patients with existing heart conditions, that patient cannot be used to indicate heart conditions). The healthier the patient, the more meaningful the study results.

So it can be difficult to amass a statistically significant population of very late stage otherwise-healthy patients (don't forget you also need a control group to receive placebo). Meaningful conclusions cannot be derived from "Let's stick this in Joe's arm and see what happens," without a lot of observation and confirmation bias tainting the results. That means that even if you set aside all ethical and legal considerations, you are still going to have a hard time amassing a sufficient study population for practical reasons. Also as noted, the more certain we are about fatality, the less time that patient has to live, and very-terminal patients have this frustrating tendency to die.

And there is a much greater possibility that they can't fix you, and you survive in utter anguish and misery while the cancer continues to advance in your body unabated. While you could instead have spent that time quietly and comfortably with loved ones and family, having traded that for a vanishingly small chance at survival, and being on the losing end of that bet. It's not like they're sitting on known cures, but busy filling out paperwork instead of saving patients. Until all the animal trials are co

Sure, but in the cases where it works you eventually come away neither dead nor wishing you were dead. So your options are

A. Take the drugs, wish you were dead, then get better, then feel fine

B. Don't take the drugs. Be actually dead.

I used to stagger home through the woods after each round of chemo, not quite wishing I was dead, but certainly feeling very sorry for myself, and then in a week's time I'd go do the same thing again. But it worked, so instead of being dead and buried back when Slashdot members with six digit user IDs didn't exist yet I'm still here and feeling fine. Slight elevated risk of solid tumours in old age, and no chance I'll win any records for free diving with what the radiotherapy did to my lungs after we finished chemo, but I'll probably outlive those of my peers who are smoking.

There was an AC posting a few days ago in the thread about "steering wheel position" who had lost his wife and young son as a result of a malfunctioning airbag sensor. That's not to take anything away from the insight of AC above, though.

Just to point out that ACs have a bad rep on slashdot that is increasingly outdated. I personally refused to sign up with/. at 5 digits because I thought I would waste more time here if I had an account. Since then privacy concerns have heightened massively. Anonymity has become something that can actually be praiseworthy.

While the standard of posts has gone down massively on slashdot in the last 15 years, far more ACs are getted modded into visibility than before. Maybe some ACs are victims of the "slashdot edit wars", or semi-famous nicks that want to make their point in a neutral way, or prolific posters who got fed up of stalkers. ACs don't mind getting routinely bashed on slashdot - but the automatic hatred of ACs seems more dogmatic than based on any recent evidence.

That's another valid point, I'm always asking questions on/. regarding things I simply don't understand. You often get called an idiot, but that's just standard forum/comment behaviour. But you always get someone knowledgeable that explains it properly. I strongly believe in asking questions rather than getting stuff wrong and slashdot is great for that.

The sad thing here may be that people who have never really had a significant health problem will act all shocked about having to "stagger home" and consider it some impossible act of bravery. Fact is, if you can walk home - or stand at all - you're not in that bad a state.

I have just watched a grandparent slowly die - bedbound. His organs were failing. He bounced in and out of awareness of the people around him. Meanwhile I'm fortunate in that I've only been really unhealthy for a couple of weeks, followin

A concern in translating this therapy to human application is the potential for toxicity. CD47 is highly expressed on tumor cells, but also at varying levels on normal (nontumor) cells. However, here we demonstrate that blockade of CD47 in immune competent mice produces an effective antitumor response without unacceptable toxicity, albeit with a temporary anemia.

Sadly anemia is a horrible symptom in itself. Best case is lightheadedness, extreme tiredness and complete inability to sustain even mild exercise ("look ma, the docter said I can't run and look !" <wham> patient lies unconscious on the floor, usually with a few bruises and a suspicious spreading discoloration in his/her face). Worst case it causes you to choke to death while your lungs are operating fine.

Let's just hope that this treatment doesn't end up with a new type of cancer cell that doesn't have the over-expressed CD47.

That's probably already true for some kinds of cancer. One of the problems with the media's coverage of cancer is that they tend to talk about it as if it were a single disease. But it's actually a catch-all term for a list of probably thousands of different diseases that have a common symptom of uncontrolled cell growth. It's pretty well understood that what works with cancer X generally can't be expected to work with cancer Y.

It's funny that people have this confusion, when for example flu is generally understood by most people as the same sort of thing, a name for hundreds of similar diseases, each caused by a single strain of virus. Part of the reason that people understand this is that the anti-flu vaccines produced each year are identified as being "for" a specific strain, and they won't protect you from other strains.

It would help understand a new "cancer cure" if we understood that it probably affects only some subset (possibly small) of all the different kinds of cancer. But if you read TFS, you don't see many hint of this, and TFA isn't all that much more specific. Of course, the researchers probably thought that by listing the cancers that they'd used in testing, they were implicitly saying "We don't know how it will affect any cancers other than these." But that message obviously hasn't gotten out to the media people who have been breathlessly reporting "a new cure for cancer" as if it were a single silver bullet that would kill all cancers. It's an old story, though, and you see the same response to many earlier "cancer cures".

Although macrophages also attacked blood cells expressing CD47 when mice were given the antibody, the researchers found that the decrease in blood cells was short-lived; the animals turned up production of new blood cells to replace those they lost from the treatment...

Analysis of patient tumor and matched adjacent normal (nontumor) tissue revealed that CD47 is overexpressed on cancer cells...CD47 is a commonly expressed molecule on all cancers, its function to block phagocytosis is known, and blockade of its function leads to tumor cell phagocytosis and elimination. CD47 is therefore a validated target for cancer therapies.

The tumor cells have more of the "I'm healthy" signals (CD47) than actual healthy cells do. If this treatment works, I suppose that means that there is a threshold effect here, if you have a normal amount of CD47 as you would on a normal cell, the immune system would ignore it.

At the very least, the side effects could be less severe than targeting all dividing cells, which is what the current generation of chemo does.

There is also the possibility to do things other than training the immune system to

human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver, and prostate tumors that have been transplanted into mice

Yeah, it helps a mouse immune system kill the tumors. Its likely it would also help a human immune system kill them.Now they need to make sure that it doesn't also kill the non-tumorous parts of the human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, liver and prostate in question.

The mice used in these studies are typically immune-suppressed to prevent it from attacking the human tumour transplanted inside. I've read about several cases where excellent animal trials did not have good outcomes in human trials. However, this is an great start, and I hope it works out.

It's a start. But you are right. People (scientists) are pushed to publish with even preliminary results. I'd prefer that stuff like this stay firmly in the scientific process, and not put out the press release until they have done enough testing to be reasonably sure of the result.

10 mice is a start. A curiosity. Something to look more at. It's getting people's hopes up today, when we won't see it available to the general population for many years. Well, that's assuming that it does work as expected. They see a 90% success rate, with a sample set of 10. How does that translate out to a sample set of 1,000? How about humans of different ethnic origins, blood types, and other factors?

I hope it does work as advertised. No one suffering from terminal cancer now, should hold their breath that it may work in their lifetime.

Publishing in scientific journals is part of the scientific process. Communication and sharing your results is critical to science, particularly when the next steps (human trials) will involve way more resources than your little wet lab probably has. You also want everyone you can get examining your work before you go giving experimental drugs to people.

The problem seems to be overeager laymen. I guess we could close all the scientific journals to non-scientists and only announce final, ready to market developments. Personally I prefer the open approach and educating the public, but if you don't, please feel free not to read any scientific publications and avoid any news articles about them.

That's dangerous ground. Jumping from "it worked in 9 of 10 mice for a few months", to "hey doc, try it on me" opens up using terminal human patients as guinea pigs.

I'm not re-reading the article, but as I recall, they tested on 10 mice over a 4 month period. What if in humans it works to a degree for 4 months, but in 6 months your bone marrow is killed off, and in the next month or two, even your skin dies. You die as your skin rots off your body.

This misconception drives me a bit batty. All cancer, if not treated, is terminal. Nearly all cancer, when detected, is being treated. There are many many many trials and studies taking place, and the oncologist that the patient is working with will do nearly everything that they can to attempt to discover any that may apply to their patients. These trials are just further along the testing path then those that are not available. Maybe one of these will prove to be a solver bullet for a patient that is invo

Cancer isn't one disease, it is a rather diverse family of diseases. Today, medicine is able to treat some of them to the level where they are cured for most of the patients. Some of them, it can give patients years of extra life. For some of them, there isn't much we can do a this point. The advance to this level have been slow, but relatively steady. This will continue. We are probably never going to cure cancer, in the sense that all cancers are survivable by 95% of the patients, but we are slowly going to get better and better, so that more and more cancers fall in that category, and for most of the rest, the average number of years the patients survive will rise.

I'm not sure why some people are so sure "big pharma" are disinterested in curing many diseases/conditions. After all, if you can sell a cure for cancer, you just landed in a bucket of money.

Beyond that, the need for a cure is overwhelming. Even corporate greed will often take a backseat because this issue affects us all. If it was a condition associated with a specific population, or with the poor etc then I'm sure the interest would be much less humanitarian.

Every day we get closer to a cure, every piece of research, even if it's only effective on mice takes us when step closer. I for one, appreciate every effort made in this regard.

I do not have cancer and no one close to me has it either. Perhaps just a matter of time.

Sell a cure, patient lives for 20-30 more years, suffers from a large number of minor ailments and a few major ones, keeps earning money for 20-30 years and spending some proportion of it on drugs, becomes a long-term revenue stream.

Which one will the evil profit-driven capitalists pick? In fact, there's a third option:

Competitor sells a cure, we don't make any money from selling the treatment.

Also there is more money to be made curing psychosomatic type disease than real one. I'm sure big pharma would be happy to get rid of scary sickness like cancer so that people live longer and pay more attention to take their variety of "psychological disorders'. Pill to cure sadness, boredom,... that where long term money is.

You cannot eradicate cancer, like you would a virus (smallpox). Cancer is an inherent flaw in the design of the human body (living past it's intended lifetime, not dying to wild animals) and we will have to put up with it for a very long time (until our understanding of medicine reaches a point where we can manipulate our genes to prevent cancer ever occurring in the first place).

If you have a cure for cancer, you will market it immediately, and make a whole lot of money. We will not reach a medical level to eradicate cancer in the patent lifetime of such a drug.

Believe it or not, there are still some people in big Pharma who are in it for the patients, not the money. And even if cancer was gone tomorrow, there would still be many many other things for big pharma to make money on, if that was all they are interested in.

Disclaimer: I work in big Pharma, and I see every day, people working hard for patients, not for the money.

Ok, so you're saying that if Big Pharma weren't evil, they'd be trying to rewrite everyone's genetic code at this point? Whereas if they are evil, they'll just try to treat cancer? If that's the choice, give me Evil anyday!

22 is fine as a lifespan for a 'natural' human. You're able to reproduce by about the age of 12, so that gives 10 years to raise your children to the point where they can survive on their own. With a tribe of overlapping ages, they'll then have the support of some other adults for the next few years until they are fully (physically) mature. The short generation, it doesn't take as long for beneficial mutations to spread to the entire tribe, so you have an advantage in evolutionary speed.

I think you've misunderstood how it works for Big Pharma; curing something does not generate them bucketloads of money.

This is simply false, which you would know if you knew the prices for cancer drugs. A drug that is effective against a cancer will make you bucketloads of money. People really don't like dying, and they will pay good money not to.

Helping someone with the symptoms for several years without curing them, however, does generate bucketloads of money. As such it's defnitely in Big Pharma's best interests to not find cure for something and instead find something that relieves the symptoms.

But what if that is not the dichotomy? What if $other_pharma_company already have a patent on a drug to help with the symptoms, and you have the options of not going into that field, making no money, or try and cure the disease, making you a bucketload of money while costing $other

The thing that you, and all the other idiots like you overlook is that if Big Pharma Company A chooses to not pursue a cure for Disease X so that they can profit from treating the symptoms, they run the risk that Big Pharma Company B will develop it. Then Big Pharma Company A not only loses the potential profit from selling the treatment for symptoms, they also lose the profit from selling the cure. The other thing you overlook is that people who die no longer spend any money on products from Big Pharma. Bi

What is the normal function of the "do not eat" signal? Just what normal function is going to get messed up when you turn this off?

I'm not sure which "do not eat" signal they're talking about. But one that I do know a little about is the one that prevents rejection of a placenta and multiple sclerosis.

The immune system apparently recognizes and avoids attacking its own body primarily by:
- Editing the sections of DNA coding for antibodies to produce a bunch of small clones of proto-antibody-producing cells that randomly react to all sorts of stuff.
- Shortly after birth (when most of mommy's random cellular components have been purged from baby's body) letting these clones take a grand tour of baby's body - and anybody who recognizes anything dies off.
- Then the survivors (who don't recognize any tissue in baby) turn themselves on and get ready to do a growth spurt if they recognize a target at the same time they're getting an "I'm being damaged" signal (i.e. histamine).Result: A no-autoimmune immune system. Well, almost.

A significant problem is that there are a few tissues that aren't deployed yet when the baby is just born. One such tissue is the myelin sheaths of the nerves. Another, of course, is placental tissue from a pregnancy. (Unlike tribbles, humans aren't born pregnant.) If nothing were done about this, the immune system tissues would be a time-bomb, ready to go into attack mode if it happens to see a damage signal near a nerve or a placenta. This would result in multiple sclerosis or spontaneous abortion - both very big negative scores in the evolutionary game. So the immune system has a patch.

The main myelin protein has a short sequence that tells the immune system that this is a late-blooming tissue, so leave it alone. (I'm guessing this may be the "do not eat" signal they're talking about.) Placental tissue has the same sequence. There are lots of opportunities for failure, of course. (Defects in the signal molecules, disease organisms mimicing it, etc.) But when this patch is working right the nerves and a new baby are protected without significantly degrading the immune system's response to diseases.

This, by the way, is the reason nursing on cow's milk is a risk factor for MS. Milk has a protein related to the myelin sheath protein, but with the "do not eat" signal slightly different. As a result a baby may develop an allergy to that component of cow's milk - and thus to the common stretch of the myelin protein. Result: Autoimmune reaction to the myelin sheaths.

Come on!!! Lets get this going, get some human subjects quickly, and lets end cancer as quickly as possible....stop just rehashing stories for the last 3 years about the same thing....I sometimes think that the amount of time it takes to get this out there, is enough tie for all of them to die from the disease....!

I have an M.D. from Harvard, I am board certified in cardio-thoracic medicine and trauma surgery, I have been awarded citations from seven different medical boards in New England, and I am never, ever sick at sea. So I ask you; when someone goes into that chapel and they fall on their knees and they pray to God that their wife doesn't miscarry or that their daughter doesn't bleed to death or that their mother doesn't suffer acute neural trama from postoperative shock, who do you think they're praying to? Now, go ahead and read your Bible, _Dennis_, and you go to your church, and, with any luck, you might win the annual raffle, but if you're looking for God, he was in operating room number two on November 17, and he doesn't like to be second guessed. You ask me if I have a God complex. Let me tell you something: I am God. ~~ Dr. Jed Hill (Malice 1993)

It won't fly, as antibodies are cheap and not complicated to do. Seriously, do you really believe Big Pharma is going to let it happen ? A treatment simple like this would jeopardize their business, risking billions of dollar. They'll do something to stop this treatment in its tracks. They always do. Sound paranoid ? I wish. It's more like realistic. Their purpose is not really to cure cancer, but getting a maximum profit from it.

I call bullshit. First of all you don't risk anything by finding such a "simple cure". There are a lot of people and a lot of them will get cancer at one time so there is a very large customer base and no shortage thereof in the long term. For the length of the patent you could sell this stuff at almost any price. Do you really think one company would keep an invention locked up (and risk loosing it to someone else) that would bring them truckloads of money?
Not to mention all the free PR you'd get.
Also I don't really believe in conspiracies that rely on large groups of people to keep quiet, make no mistakes and act against their own private interests.

Expressed in other terms:How may drug company execs will let their children, their spouses, or their friends die of cancer for better shareholder returns? Not all of them. It only takes one whistle blower, or potential whistle blower, to louse up plans like this.

One drug company supposedly had a drug for an inherited, fatal condition, but was going to can development of it, as there probably wasn't enough profit. A board member, who had a friend who's child had that condition basically said, "if you can this drug, I'm going to the press with it." Fearing the backlash, the company introduced the drug and now boasts about how good they are to bring drugs for smaller markets to market.

It won't fly, as antibodies are cheap and not complicated to do. Seriously, do you really believe Big Pharma is going to let it happen ? A treatment simple like this would jeopardize their business, risking billions of dollar. They'll do something to stop this treatment in its tracks. They always do. Sound paranoid ? I wish. It's more like realistic. Their purpose is not really to cure cancer, but getting a maximum profit from it.

I call bullshit. First of all you don't risk anything by finding such a "simple cure". There are a lot of people and a lot of them will get cancer at one time so there is a very large customer base and no shortage thereof in the long term. For the length of the patent you could sell this stuff at almost any price. Do you really think one company would keep an invention locked up (and risk loosing it to someone else) that would bring them truckloads of money?
Not to mention all the free PR you'd get.
Also I don't really believe in conspiracies that rely on large groups of people to keep quiet, make no mistakes and act against their own private interests.

I suppose that if this treatment is as effective as advertised, we will soon see just how powerful Big Pharma's influence is. There is no doubt that there will always be a "customer base" of cancer patients (unless this becomes some sort of vaccine, which that will NEVER be allowed to happen), but it's rather difficult to put a price tag on a single injection and then convince your insurance company that it is something they should cover. The latter challenge is what may prove to be the most difficult for

I suppose that if this treatment is as effective as advertised, we will soon see just how powerful Big Pharma's influence is.

You're assuming that a cure for cancer would not be in the interests of Big Pharma. I don't think that is necessarily true. Most current cancer treatments are expensive (also often expensive to produce, so not a huge profit margin) and are only sold for shortish treatment periods. Either the patient recovers or dies. A proper cure could easily see people living 20+ years longer. Old people tend to be a better market for pharmaceuticals (of the non-recreational kind, anyway) and so the profit from having people not die from cancer is likely to be greater than the loss from not selling them cancer treatments.

Exactly. Imagine you ran the company that found the cure to cancer, the magic bullet that stopped all cancer dead in its tracks. Even if you didn't make a dime off of the cure itself, your new company slogan would be "We Cured Cancer!" Every commercial from then on out would say "From the people who cured cancer comes a radical new treatment for XYZ." Heck, even any regulations the government tried to saddle them with could be spun as "The government takes action against the cancer curers! OMG HORROR!" Any pharmaceutical company would kill (or save lives as the case may be) for this PR.

What does cost to produce have to do with price, other than to set a minimum? Besides, you can get generic painkillers for 12p a box here in the UK, or you can buy the name brand stuff for £3.50; the two co-exist just fine. (Though I wonder who on earth buys the name-brand stuff...)

They'll do something to stop this treatment in its tracks. They always do.

They've already applied for the patent for treating cancers in this way. If granted, 17 years of income for a cancer cure which they control the market on would make them a trillion dollars. Each. Although, they could just be patenting it to prevent anyone else patenting it, although naturally whomever funded the study is going to want a sizeable return on their investment and it's fair enough they get it.

I'm no expert in these things, but AFAIK the process goes something like this:

Test your idea in a petri dish. If it works, continue.

Test your idea in an animal. If it works, continue.

Test your idea in another type of animal. If it works, continue.

Test your idea in a small handful of healthy humans at very small doses. If it doesn't cause them any harm, continue.

Test your idea in a larger number of healthy humans at slightly higher doses. If it doesn't cause them any harm, continue.

Test your idea in a handful of sick humans. If it works better than existing treatments, continue. (This is going to be awkward. Ethical clearance is an important part of any medical testing; there's little chance of getting ethical clearance of using this in place of existing treatments for cancer patients because if it doesn't work, you've delayed them treatment that could have worked. You could possibly use it in conjunction with, or in patients for whom existing treatments haven't worked, but then there's the question of is the treatment more/less effective when the cancer's progressed that far? Or if it's given in conjunction with existing treatments? Sure you can devise tests to deal with these issues, but they won't be as simple as "administer drug, keep a list of who's had it and what the results were".)

Test your idea in a large number of sick humans. If it works better than existing treatments, continue.

Release your treatment into the market.

Each of these steps can take months. Some of it's political and administrative wrangling, some of it's just that the test itself will take some time before you can be sure of the results. A drug can fail at any one of these stages and it's back to the drawing board (or maybe the test tube).

The whole process takes years. Yet newspapers often start reporting about "miracle cure" drugs that have only just completed the first round of live animal trials. Which is why you hear about all sorts of miracle cures that never see the light of day.

Typically the first testing in humans is done in patients which have already failed multiple therapies (relapse or resistant), eliminating the ethical quandry that they would have had a better response with conventional treatment.

Test your idea in a handful of sick humans. If it works better than existing treatments, continue. (This is going to be awkward. Ethical clearance is an important part of any medical testing; there's little chance of getting ethical clearance of using this in place of existing treatments for cancer patients because if it doesn't work, you've delayed them treatment that could have worked. You could possibly use it in conjunction with, or in patients for whom existing treatments haven't worked, but then there's the question of is the treatment more/less effective when the cancer's progressed that far? Or if it's given in conjunction with existing treatments? Sure you can devise tests to deal with these issues, but they won't be as simple as "administer drug, keep a list of who's had it and what the results were".)

There are patients who refuse chemo because they prefer death to the side effects. They would gladly volunteer for an alternative treatment with less extreme side-effects. I have seen my grandmother go through chemo, and I hope I never have to make this decision, but if I were diagnosed with non-operable cancer, I'm not sure I'd opt to be treated. I suppose it would depend on survival chances. 80% survival rate, I'd probably think it's worth a try. 50% survival rate or worse? I'd probably opt to take